Reddit self-promotion rules: which subreddits allow links to your own stuff

But there’s no unified ruleset for self-promotion on the site; the site-wide rules only ask people not to spam. Beyond that, each subreddit can add its own rules, or have none.

Searching for “self-promotion” isn’t enough, because the rules are written for human readers, and there’s only one idea in a hundred different ways of saying it. All the details in the Methodology, at the end.

Which subreddits allow self-promotion?

Almost none allow self-promotion unconditionally. Only 0.59% of 107,650 subreddits do. That’s just counting active subreddits that have written rules. Under one percent, and most that address it either ban it outright, or allow it conditionally.

In the end, I found that subreddits that freely allow self-promotion are rarer, and the ones I did find are dubious. I ran a blind check on them by another model from the same family. It agreed with me only about three in four “allow” verdicts.

The entire group was then split up by what kind of rules they had.

The first four rows there sum to 45.5%, which is the share of subreddits that have their own promotion rule. “Own rule” here means anything beyond the boilerplate line. Allowing for some sloppiness on the part of an AI reader, that’s probably in the ballpark, though it could be anywhere from 41.6% to 49.8%. So just under half of subreddits with written rules have a rule about how things get promoted.

If you widen the base to active subreddits (155,717) and count any rules that are available, the share with rules drops to one third (31.4%).

The rest of them either use the boilerplate line, “no spam”, or nothing at all. The boilerplate line gets revisited later; it turned out to be more important than I’d thought.

Try itThe rules and removed posts of a subreddit you pick: Subreddits

How many subreddits ban self-promotion?

About one in five subreddits (21.0%) ban self-promotion in their rules. Another 23.7% allow it but only under certain conditions.

Many of the rules that are classified as banning self-promotion start by saying something like “you may not promote yourself”, but then go on to say something like “except if you first contact the mod team” or “or if you also join the community”. Plain keyword search would read these as bans. The AI readers went back through these subreddits and rechecked them, and as a result, about a quarter of them were reclassified as conditionally allowed.

The phrase “no excessive promotion” is ambiguous enough that I counted it as a condition. Arguably it’s more of a ban with a soft edge, so the other reading is defensible too.

Same sentence, banning excessive promotion, spam, any kind of advertising, recurs in many rules. Roughly one in ten has just that sentence, with no other wording about promotion. I counted those apart from subreddits that had their own dedicated promotion rule.

When I count subreddits with that sentence included, I get 55.5% with any written promotion rule.

What is the 10 percent self-promotion rule?

It’s a “promo cap” where the number of promotional posts you can make is capped at something like one-in-ten posts, expressed as a ratio like 9:1 or 10 percent.

Screenshot of reddit.com, captured Nov 15, 2026

I found that there are at least 617 subreddits with this rule in place. This is more of a floor than a ceiling. The number was found by a keyword search and will miss some instances of the rule. An AI agent also looked through a sample of promotion rules and found that all four ratio rules were real, but there were too few to draw conclusions from.

The conditions under which these rules apply are usually not numerical. The most common kind that my keyword search could detect was the vague kind, along the lines of "don't promote things excessively", or "only promote things if the community participates". Here are the findings from subreddits where I was able to find a promotion rule via keyword search.

I found evidence for the "permission angle" (checking with the moderators before promoting something) about one in nine times. I had thought that dedicated thread or day (e.g. a "promo thread every week") would be more common than it turned out to be.

The bars are from keyword counts, so these are just an approximation, and probably somewhat undercounted.

Do busier subreddits more often have a self-promotion rule?

Yes, larger subreddits are more likely to have their own promotion rule, but the gap is mostly due to small subreddits that only have the template sentence. (the template is counted too, and the gap is much smaller).

Let’s split subreddits into five bins of equal size based on how many posts they get per year, with bigger meaning more posts (not more subscribers), and see what share have their own promotion rule.

It climbs at each step: 31.9% in the smallest fifth, 62.4% in the largest.

That’s a surprising result; the line is much flatter, 54.7% in the smallest fifth and 63.6% in the largest. Most of that gap is due to small subreddits having just the template sentence, but there’s still a smaller gap left.

Having rules doesn’t mean being strict; both conditions and bans increase with size. I’m not going to try to rank which type of subreddit is tougher. It’s correlation, not causation, so you can’t say size causes either conditions or bans.

Try itSubreddits like the one you want to post in, so you can compare their rules: Find Subs

Do posts get removed more often where self-promotion is banned?

It’s hard to say whether a “written” ban has an effect, since the groups are too blurred.

Another thing I can detect is when people post links to their own site; when a post is removed, the text gets removed, but the link stays. So I can check what person submitted links to each site. Here are domains that have only one author, and where that person submitted at least four of every five Reddit links to that domain in the year. (I also require that they have at least three link posts in total.) I haven’t tested how well this matches reality, and there’s no proof of ownership.

Here is the removal frequency of those posts, compared to all other posts in the same subreddit. And here is the removed share of posts, grouped by keywords searched in each subreddit’s rules. The bars pool posts together from each group without correcting for the subreddit, while the numbers in the accompanying tables are the ratio.

The links to websites, most of which belong to a single individual, were removed at a rate of about 1.3× higher than other posts in the subreddit. When the rules contain only a template (or the plain phrase “no spam”), the ratios are closer to one. When the template is used by itself, the interval is too wide to make a conclusion. Here are the ratios along with their intervals.

Again, this isn’t enough to prove that a ban was the cause, and the groupings of keywords are fuzzy. But according to the AI readers, about one in thirteen of the subreddits labeled “nothing” by the keywords actually had a promo rule. And about a quarter of the “bans” were just the condition part of the rule. I wanted an answer to the question of whether the wording of a rule affects the fate of a post, but I’m not sure I got one. One possible explanation, which I didn’t measure, is that people who make many posts to their own site might have newer accounts. Fresh accounts might be more likely to be removed, and neither of those factors is included here.

The business subreddit removals were covered in my previous article.

Is a bigger share of new subreddit rules about self-promotion?

Nothing seems to be visible after checking, but some subreddits still have their old rule from May 19, 2022:

About one in ten of the new rules that have survived on each half-year since then is on self-promotion:

Again, this is just a keyword search, and I don’t see a clear trend upward.

The deleted rules are not visible here, so the count only includes rules that are still around.

So how do you promote on Reddit?

Here's some advice for how to promote on Reddit. First of all, check the rules of every subreddit you want to post to, because they're different. Slightly under half of the 107,650 active subreddits that have readable written rules have their own rule about it. If your desired subreddit doesn't have such a rule, that's not an automatic "yes", but the data is silent on whether your post will be successful or not.

Newcomer accounts have a rough go of it; there are minimums for karma or account age, counted separately. The binding condition is a rule that requires mod approval or posting in a designated weekly thread.

What's the best time to post on Reddit? Here's a breakdown by subreddit.

If you have any errors to report, please contact the author. Every fix is logged along with the date on the page. Ideas from readers are welcome! What subreddit rules would you like data on next?

What this data can't tell you

Method

Conflict of interest: KissMyPost makes Reddit research tools. Funding: none.

Corrections: contact me; each fix gets a dated note on this page.

Questions people ask (FAQ)

The data

• CSVWhat the rules say, by levelShare of subreddits whose written rules ban, conditionally allow or allow self-promotion, or only carry the stock sentence, a plain no-spam rule or nothing, with 95% intervals.
• CSVConditions in promotion rulesSubreddits whose promotion rule sets each condition (mod permission, a set thread or day, a 9:1 ratio and others), found by keyword search, with 95% intervals.
• CSVOwn promotion rule, by sizeShare of subreddits with their own rule about self-promotion, by fifth of posts in a year, with 95% intervals.
• CSVAny written promotion rule, by sizeThe same, counting the stock sentence about excessive promotion as a rule.
• CSVBans, by sizeShare of subreddits whose rules ban self-promotion, by fifth of posts, with 95% intervals.
• CSVConditional allowances, by sizeShare of subreddits whose rules allow self-promotion only under a condition, by fifth of posts, with 95% intervals.
• CSVRemovals of posts to one-author domainsRemoved share of posts to one-author domains, other links and text posts, and observed over expected removal with 95% intervals, by keyword group.
• CSVNew rules about promotion, by half-yearShare of newly written rules that are about self-promotion, from 2022 to 2026, in subreddits that still have a rule dated May 19, 2022.
• PNGMain chart (PNG)What subreddit rules say about self-promotion, as an image.

Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24142415